According to former senior rendering lead at Ubisoft, Sebastian Aaltonen, building ports from current gen console already around for Nintendo Switch is going to be a pretty dramatic process, which could possibly lead developers to reduce in size and scope titles involved – if those ports are set to be necessary (only sales will tell, we guess).

Here’s his statement provided on Beyond 3D forums.

“Around 50% of modern game engine frame time goes to running compute shaders (lighting, post processing, AA, AO, reflections, etc). Maxwell’s tiled rasterizer has zero impact on compute shaders. 25.6 GB/s is pretty low as everybody knows that 68 GB/s of Xbox One isn’t that great either. ESRAM is needed to reach good performance. But I am talking about the POV of down porting current gen games to Switch.

Switch certainly fares well against last gen consoles, and Maxwell’s tiled rasterizer would certainly help older pixel + vertex shader based renderers. Too bad last gen consoles already got their last big AAA releases year ago. Easy ports between Xbox 360 and Switch are not available anymore. Xbox One is a significantly faster hardware. Straightforward code port is not possible. Content also needs to be simplified.”